How to Publish and Monetise your Thesis?

You’ve worked hard over the months to create a thesis that resembles one of your biggest achievements in your life. But what becomes of all this work once you’re done with it? Is there a way to make a dime from all this work and effort? Technically there is! And that is in the ‘self-publishing industry.’

While this may sound a bit cheesy, if you’ve already finished your thesis and earned enough praises from your superiors, it might be worth a shot. After all, self-publishing is free and takes only a few hours. All you need to do is convert your thesis from doc or pdf into an ebook, brush up your work to become easily readable and void of errors and market your work online.

Let’s start with a basic publishing company: Lulu.com.Theygive their clients the chance to publish hardcopies for their readers or to publish pdf versions of their book. Meanwhile Lulu has a simple process, there are far too many books and fewer buyers than on Amazon. So you will have to sell your thesis yourself either by promoting it to friends, family , on social media or on your personal website (if you have one.)

On the bright side, with Lulu, you can distribute your work to other platforms like Apple’s iBookstore and Barnes and Noble’s Nook, where you can broaden the access to your work. However, they do take a a certain percentage of your total sales and on top of that Lulu will also take a 1-2% commission if you distribute through their system.

Other websites where you can share your work with a higher standard of buyers is on Amazon, by trying out the Amazon Kindle publishing services, where you can earn 70% or 35% revenue of your total sales. To some extent, all the current Kindles do a bang-up job of replicating the reading experience of having a hardcopy in digital form. Ebooks can allow avid readers tap into a vast library of eBook titles with a long battery life because of its black and white frame. Although this is better for those whose thesis are more qualitative, (having fewer graphs, images, diagrams or calculations.) This is, because converting images into an ebook can mess up your imagery, font or settings. For transferring word documents into ebooks, I’d suggest downloading Calibre to help you convert your word docs. If you are unfamiliar with Calibr, here is this few minute tutorial to see how you can convert your data. It’s quick and easy! 😀

Just like Lulu, Koboa is another friendly platform for publishing your work, where your earnings will directly be transferred to your bank account. However many readers complained about the slow page turner and sometimes tough to follow orders. But its still a fun and easy method to give yourself a chance to monetise your thesis.

The best part with all these platforms is that you can personally set the promotional price and pre-orders of your work. If you believe that your work is deserving more praise and credibility, you can raise your prices you see fit. (Although my suggestion would be to lower it if you are a first time publisher, before creating a name for yourself.) It is difficult to find your target audience, if you are a new or an unpublished author or researcher in your field. It all comes down to how you market yourself and what knowledge you can give your readers. Picture yourself as the buyer: how much would you be willing to spend on a book like yours? If you know the answer, that should be your demand.